jasondain's Blog at LumberJocks.comhttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog
Mon, 26 Aug 2013 20:36:57 GMTRecord #4c smoothing plane refurbish completedhttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/37539
Along the lines of my last post, I seem to have caught the old tool refurbish bug. I found this plane at an antique dealer in Chester NS on the way back from a beach day. I’ve driven by these places a hundred times without thinking that they might have some interesting stuff. I took the plunge and a lot of places had some interesting stuff including saws, drills and lots of wooden planes. None of them really interested me as I was looking for an old smoother (#3 or 4) size with a iron body.

Here is the before pic. There was a fair bit of surface rust and the handles were quite gummed up. The blade had some pitting but not where it counts. For $30 I figured this would be a good smoother to try to refurbish. My research places it in the mid 1950’s production date.

I took the plane completely apart and used a metal brush on my drill to clean up all the metal excluding the brass parts. For those, I used some fine sandpaper and steel wool to polish them. I scraped the old lacquer off the handles and oiled them with some linseed oil as I prefer the flat look to the glossy look.

I lapped the bottom and sides using 120, 220, and 320 grit paper on my jointer bed. As this plane is corrugated on the bottom, this went fairly quickly. The blade was lapped on my DMT diasharp and water stones until it was flat, shiny and razor sharp to 35’ angle. With the cleanup complete, I reassembled and was able to get fine shavings and surface. This will now get added to my ever growing collection of tools for use in subsequent projects. The site I found very useful to guide me was here.

Finished pics follow, thanks for reading.

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Mon, 26 Aug 2013 20:36:57 GMThttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/37539jasondainjasondainOld Hand Drill refurbish completed (I think...)http://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/37297
This summer while on vacation in NH, we made a stop in Maine to hit some woodworking stops. First off we hit Christian Becksvoorts shop in New Gloucester then we went to Lie Nielsen tools and finally stopped at Liberty tool in Liberty ME. I had heard about this place in magazines and online and those didn’t even come close to preparing me for the number and variety of tools they had there. If you are in the area, I highly recommend stopping in. I know I will be making another trip there this fall to find some more old tools to fix up. This is my second operation and I really enjoy reading about the history of old tools and making them work again.

I got this hand drill that was unmarked for a few bucks and figured I could tune it up. I did all kinds of research and determined it was likely a Millers falls #2 or #5 or some knock off from the time. The cast iron was a bit beat up and rusty, the knobs were a bit busted up and the handle had been replaced by the owner years ago.

I fully disassembled the drill and cleaned up all the metal parts with a wire brush on my drill and that worked quite well. I then used WD-40 and a tooth brush to clean out any grime in the gears etc. My friend Richard graciously offered to help turn new handles for the drill and we made them out of Cocobolo and used Ferrules from Lee Valley. They turned out really nice and I’m very pleased with how they look. I decided to make the handles a bit larger than the original as I found them too small in use. Unfortunately, this has made me want to get a lathe so I need to manage that as my tool allowance on the home front is pretty limited unless we get another pet and I don’t want to go there as we have 3 cats and a dog already.

My final conundrum is whether to paint or not. The original drill had a gloss black enamel on the frame and the inner part of the wheel was glossy red like this I actually prefer the raw cast iron so will likely just wax and call it day and use it in my next projects. Thanks for reading.

Original Drill;

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:13:38 GMThttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/37297jasondainjasondainMy Benchcrafted Split Top Roubo build #3: Glide vise build and installhttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/33587
In part 3 of my blog, I’ll discuss how I went about building the vice chop and installed the vice hardware. I decided to diverge from the plans at this stage to use a thinner chop and change the shape from the published plans. I used a plane lever cap from my veritas bevel up smoother as a pattern as I liked that shape a bit better.

I milled a piece of 8/4 stock as thick as i could leave it and it ended up at about 1 13/16 thick. I decided to leave the bark in instead of out on the board as I liked the grain orientation better that way. I had the stock in my climate controlled shop a few weeks before building so I wasnt too worried about cupping and i figured i could always plane it down if it did. I marked out the shape as shown below.

Once I had the shape and orientation set, I layed out the mortise and setup for the tenon on the glide.

I cut out the parts on the bandsaw and shaped them using my spindle sander, planes and spokeshave.

I followed the glide vise installation instructions fairly closely and ended up with the vise in its final position. The instructions were very clear and easy to follow.

At this time, the base was basically done and ready to start on the top.

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Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:27:52 GMThttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/33587jasondainjasondainMy Benchcrafted Split Top Roubo build #2: Split Top Roubo Base build part 2http://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/33586
This is part 2 of my bench build blog. I’ll continue talking about the base construction and how i went about it.

Once I had completed the “easy” mortises that were 1/2 inch, I moved on to the 1 inch mortises for the knockdown hardware. I chose to use a template, template bit and 1/2 upcut spiral bit to do the job. I had seen another method used on another blog where the author used a Festool MFS but didnt have the room in my budget for one of those so I improvised. I started with a 3/4” spade bit to hog out most of the material and then finished with the template and spiral bit taking 1/4” or so passes until I bottomed out at 2”.

After finishing the 4 monster mortises, I fit the tenons and then assembled the base.

After seeing things looking good together, I took things apart and drilled holes for holding the holdfasts, dog “push up” hole and the holes for the knockdown bolts.

Once those were done, it was time to install the vise (next blog entry).

To keep things together related to the base, I drilled and installed the drawbore pegs to draw the mortise and tenon joints tight.

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Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:10:10 GMThttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/33586jasondainjasondainMy Benchcrafted Split Top Roubo build #1: Split Top Roubo base constructionhttp://lumberjocks.com/jasondain/blog/33585
This is part 1 of my blog on how I built my workbench. The bench is now complete but i’ll be adding the steps i used to build it and lots of photos here so others may benefit from what I learned in the process. Happy Reading!

I constructed the base using 8/4 Sugar Maple. I had agonized a bit over the wood selection and considered soft-maple, white ash and even douglas fir as possibilities. I chose sugar maple for its durability as I wanted this to be the uber-workbench and I could get the lumber at a decent price from our local lumber store.

I started by jointing and planing the stock to 1 3/4” thick, jointing the edge and ripping to width in preparation for glue-up.

I then spread glue on the parts using a 1/16” grooved putty knife as recommended in the construction notes and glued up the 4 legs.

After drying time of about 24 hrs, I surfaced the leg stock to final dimensions using my planer and jointer. I had purchased new infinity tools high-speed steel replacement blades for my planer and these worked great as compared to the Dewalt OEM blades. I oriented the grain pith in as I liked this orientation and it appeared to be the proper method based on my web-searching.

I then used a combination of my table saw to cut the shoulders on the end-tenons and my band saw to cut the cheeks to complete the tenons. This combination worked well for me as I felt the dado would have had a hard time removing this much material in one pass.

I then made the mortises using my hollow chisel mortiser and vacuum setup. I used a 1/2 japanese steel chisel from Lee Valley instead of the stock chisels and it did a wonderful job. I cleaned up the mortises using my mortise chisels and mallet to finish the job.

The stretchers followed a similar processing using the table saw for the shoulder cuts, and the bandsaw for the cheeks. I used the fence and a stop block behind the blade to control the cheek cuts. I then completed the job using a borrowed Rabbet block plane to clean up the tenons (Thanks Rich!). I’ll be picking up one of my own sometime soon as this is a great tool!